Slaughterhouses 189 familiar, face we so admire And that the two faces are perfectly comfortably attached to the same body What we perhaps fear most, is that each of the two faces can no more exist without the other than can the two sides of a coin (2001, p 7) If we strip away that comfort and confront the Holocaust on Bauman’s terms we are left with the uncomfortable idea that ‘the Holocaust was not an irrational outflow of the not-yet-fully-eradicated residues of pre-modern barbarity It was a legitimate resident in the house of modernity; indeed one who would not be at home in any other house’ (2001, p 17) The crucial point for this discussion is that the mass slaughter of living, sentient beings is not an aberration Rather, it is woven into and a direct consequence of modernist social relations It is essential, albeit confronting, coming to terms with the violent not just refined face of modernity Arendt (2006) explained how it is that violence and atrocities are normalised and routinised; how they come to be accepted by many—otherwise ‘good’ or compassionate—people The strength of such a view that is an inherently sociological one is that it moves away from binary thinking of (individual) good versus evil and instead allows us to acknowledge the way violence and abuse are embedded in and often justified by social systems and their authorities Identifying the ideological mechanisms used to uphold socially sanctioned regimes of power is important if we are to have any hope of untangling and dismantling them In the next section, we consider some of the recent ethnographic work done in slaughterhouses and discuss the specific ideological mechanisms that contribute to the normalisation and acceptance of the immense scale of the slaughter of animals We start with a discussion of the use of technology for large-scale violence Responses While there has been considerable multidisciplinary work focussing on the slaughterhouse, attention has tended to focussed on labour conditions, public health implications and the economics of meat processing and consumption as opposed to the animals themselves (for example, Gouveia and Juska 2002; LeDuff 2003; Young Lee 2008) In part this is because such foci reflect the interests of the AIC and/or reflect the anthropocentrism common to the vast majority of scholarship in the west However, it is also worth noting that gaining access to slaughterhouses, their workers and their